--- Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In what sense would these be nuclear powered? > Nuclear propulsion is > practical for long, slow accelerations, not lifting > off a massive body like > the earth. Relatively little progress has been made > in that area because > the physics is straightforward, and the chemistry > basically just chemical > engineering. I think material science is probably > the area where the > advances would be most useful. The next most > important advance would be > rugged electronics. In my own limited field, we > subject electronics to far > greater stresses than anything one would expect > going to space.
Let me toss in a different technology - nanotech. The single most interesting thing I attended in my year at MIT was a talk by an aeronautical engineering professor here on the aerospace implications of nanotech - in particular, the nanotech developments _already working in his lab_. One of the things that he showed us were massive increases in the efficiency of jet and rocket engines. He actually handed out a working jet engine about the size of my thumb. The engine for the F-22 - probably the most advanced "normal" jet engine in the world has (IIRC - it's been several months now) an 8:1 power to weight ratio, which is pretty good. This little thing, a first generation engine using nanotech, has a 50:1 power to weight ratio. It was astonishing - one of the most interesting hours of my life, really. I've never seen a presentation anything like it - and it was most impressive not because it was all "blue sky" projects but because everything he was talking about was either _already working_ or very close to being so. He thought, IIRC, that he and his grad students could, if they chose, build a rocket that could put 10 kgs in LEO for about $50,000. It was just mindblowing - I wish I had a tape of the presentation so I could show it to people. Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
